Fireproof
by Harlequin Sequins
Summary: If death is never ending, then this must be it. AU in which Liebgott finds himself in the Nazi concentration camps. Liebgott-centric.
1. Part I: Man On Fire

_Author's Note: _I know Liebgott's family moved to America way before the Holocaust began. But this is one of those instances of _what if? _I've been reading a lot of Holocaust material lately. A lot of memoirs, a lot of articles and essays...I suppose this is a reflection of a mind struggling to understand the concept of killing millions of people that never did a thing to deserve it. This is very AU...of what Liebgott would have been like, perhaps, if his family had not left Austria. If he had suffered the wrath of the Germans in the camps.

This is part one of a two part story. Please let me know what you think of it.

Disclaimer - I do not own Band of Brothers and this story is based on Joe Liebgott's fictional counterpart, played by Ross McCall.

* * *

If death is never ending, then this must be it. Death. The end of life. It seems so final, but it really isn't. To those who believe so ardently that their hearts fill their stomachs (with the bread of hope, not the scanty, molding crusts they are given for physical nourishment)…this is a place of middle ground. A medium. It separates them by a thin partition from their beloved after-home. This is an escape from Hell and the ascent to the gates of pearl. A throwing up of hands and bowing down of knees to the tyrants of this human cage. Heaven is close enough to touch for most.

But Joseph Liebgott, an exception, is a man that cannot graze the roots of Heaven with his bare fingertips. There is not a stitch of capitulation in his wiry bones. He may be on the brink of death, his emaciated body tipping over and over, but he is never falling because of that fire in his eyes. It often leaves him lying in the dirt, in the snow, he has forgotten how many seasons have passed since his first step into slavery. That fire, it earns him beatings with iron rods, with wooden clubs, with the butts of guns to the jaw, lashings with a whip embellished with pain (barbs on the ends that open him up like a ragdoll, bleeding reddened insides).

He will not surrender. He could not, even if he wished for it, for giving up. He doesn't know its face.

Less rations. More work. More beatings.

Still, he soldiers on.

Part of him wonders, when he lies in his bunk, counting the lice that skitter across the roofs of his being (a bunk, that is all he feels he owns in the world, and in his pocket, a rusting spoon). No, that isn't right. All of him wonders. He becomes an instrument of question. Why are they here? Why them? What crime against God have they committed for such torture?

Why hadn't he become a soldier?

This is the battle of inquisition that he fights tonight. He watches himself as if through another, a separate being from the body of Joseph Liebgott (a walking corpse, the living dead). He marches in time perfectly. He works his fingers to blood and bone (often, he leaves leave his work and bears 'home' the hands that draw a map of suffering, and yet he never complains, always fights harder still). If he were not so valuable a worker to the SS, to his greedy Kapo, he might have been shot already for his unspoken insolence. His will to live, his will to survive.

In this place, there is only the will to die faster, to quietly waste away into selection. Muselmen, they are called. Towers of bone and skin that stretch over the stark angles like windows into a broken-down soul (sometimes it sputters, an engine trying to restart itself, but there is no fuel left to engage the spark).

Liebgott is no muselman. Not in essence. He is a fighter. And he should have joined the army long ago. Perhaps he would have saved his family from suffering. From death. Perhaps they could have gone away to America, the land of promise, of save haven. When he imagines America, the picture of a beautiful white church in the middle of a vast and angry sea comes to the forefront of his mind. It remains there, a citadel of hope perhaps, if the fire ever dwindles, ever feels too weak to earn more beatings and less rations and more work. If he ever feels like the muselmen, he digs for the citadel out of a box of memory…it is the only one that isn't falling apart (he has forgotten his mother's face carved of angels, his father's deep voice of nocturne, the touch of real warmth, not illusory pieces that he takes out of those caving in boxes).

Hope. Please, another day. These are words of passion now. Not poetry, not politics. Simple conjecture on living to see the birth of tomorrow, the first fiery breath of a new sun that overturns a world of grey ashes into fire again. Liebgott is always the first one out his bunk to see it. The beacon. It caresses his gaunt face as it sheds a little light on him, for him. Softly, so that no one may hear it (the guards, his Kapo, his dying brothers in misery), it imparts a little fire into his fighting soul, his soldier's heart, for another day. He keeps it always, in honor of the morning star, the eyes of God watching over his children of Israel.

Another morning means another inspection (form ranks of five outside the barrack, stand until the world ends, feel exhaustion and starvation creep up their legs like hungry vines). His Kapo doesn not like the fighter's heart that reflects its strength in his eyes. The German Jew tells him to kneel before his superior. Joseph remains silent, steadfast against the angry sea, lips morphing into a strong, cold line (hatred burned behind that quiet mouth, _what fucking superior? You and I are the same in every way_). _Pig, I said kneel. _The fighting Jew resists wordlessly, still standing like an equal, like a man, before oppression in the flesh infected with corruption. _I will not bow. _

_You will not kneel? I will show you how, then. Stubborn pig, will you ever learn or is pain your only reason for living?_

He may be spread out across the floor like a rug made of skin, his back aching with the blows, his head reeling with the pain, his entire being reaching out of itself to let the numbness invade a hollow shell. But he never bows. He never, not once, bends to his knees before the tyrants. They could have his body, torture him into reluctant existence, but they can never have his spirit. His will to live.

Another selection. He stands naked among the others. Shamed. Nothing but an animal behind their barbed-wire fence. He is starving, his stomach screaming for another piece of bread, anything to crush the growing void. He is exhausted, all strength gathering into small places where it doesn't feel so overwhelmed by an empty body. He is bruised, wounded. But never breaking. Never. He runs before his tormentors and tells them that they cannot have him, their ovens cannot take him into their mouths of hell and taste the bitterness of his heart. He runs, he sprints, he dashes through the mud that paints his ankles in their filth, and he shows them that their efforts are in vain. If they want him, they will have to kill him with their own hands.

But that they cannot do, not yet. There is value left in the _störrisch_ _schwein _yet.


	2. Part II: Nameless

_Author's Note:_I still need to edit this. I was thinking of writing a third part, the part that involves his healing from the effects of the camps. But I'm pretty sure it will end here. Remember, this is all fiction. And completely alternate universe.

disclaimer - I don't own Band of Brothers. This story is based on the fictional portrayal of Joseph Liebgott. Not the real soldier himself. :)

I have to go back and edit the last few segments because they've switched into past-tense from present-tense style.:)

A small playlist, if you like to listen to music while you read:

_Mary Goes to Jesus - John Debney_  
_Elegy for Dunkirk - Dario Marianelli_  
_Canto III - Red_  
_Black Smoke - James Horner  
I've Seen Hell - Martin Phipps _

* * *

Another transfer.

Another camp.

It is when he sees her. She glows amongst the sea of walking death. Like his citadel captured within the gnashing waters, the caresses of his morning star. She feels the same against his skin, against his heart, and he wanders over to her, drawn to the light like a creature of darkness. Blind to such beauty. He hasn't seen a woman in months, or has it been a year? He doesn't remember, but memory recalls the sensation of loveliness brushing against his barren flesh. They lock eyes. She is in much better shape than he and she reaches into her torn pocket, where rations are stored. In his hands, a token of a stranger's kindness, a piece of bread.

There is no room in the cattle car. Not to sit, not to stand, not even to dream, for the spoken reveries of other men overrun his silent thought. The train seems to drive on toward eternity, never stopping once for the dead that are only marked by a thud against the putrid floor. The cadence is unending. It goes on through the night, through the first shreds of dawn. Thud, thud, thud. He has ceased to care for such sounds long ago, for the termination of life, simply because it is as common as the day itself – there is no transition from sun to moon without witnessing death.

The man before him falls like an empty sack. Thud. No food, no water, and it's so very cold. Snow has begun to fall, creeping into this boxcar graveyard, and it tries to bury the unmarked dead. It is a white dawn. No color to ease him, no morning star to caress his face, to reignite the fire. He is beginning to feel weak. Perhaps, if he just became an empty sack like them. Fell to the ground and let the snow try to bury him too.

He locks eyes with something beautiful. Deep and brown and warm and for once he feels warmth pool into his core, puddles of makeshift heat. There she is. Beauty herself. The coltish boy in him wishes to step over the corpses and be near to her, to soak her in, commit to foolish memory what beauty feels like, tastes like. Looks like. His eyes paint the portrait into the walls of his mind. Large dark eyes hollowed out by emaciation. No hair, but what is left of it allows his imagination fill in the rest (deep, dark brown that is soft against his cheek). Gaunt bones that protrude out of a thin face. Everything about her is shapes and angles. There is no softness, but once, he knew, there must have been. Soft hair, soft eyes, soft face. Even her lips are chapped and turning blue.

She is standing too close to the open windows, where icicles have made their home. As the afternoon recedes into a frozen dusk, he crosses the body-riddled car with a threadbare blanket (it once belonged to a young boy, but he is shapeless, unmoving, now with eyes that are open portals into the netherworld…he had glanced, once, into them and felt the shiver of the Reaper that felt too near). He drapes the blanket over the sharp peaks of her shoulders.

They never speak, not once, not even when she gives him half of her rations and he offers her a blanket that he could have, if he wanted to, used for himself. They stand beside one another until the car opens, the watery sunshine fills in the shadows that the dead have made, and only a few of the remaining living stagger out into the ankle-deep snow. They are among them. Their breath makes indentations into the material of the world (ghosts of their past that they exhale as time travels wearily on).

There is another selection here. He will work in the mud-polluted snow. She will traipse the cold, bare white of the hospital barrack. It is the only reason she was not sent to die with the other women…her small hands could fit for factory work, but there is better use for them caked in blood and sorrow. He does not see her anymore, but every morning, before the barracks are called for their ranks of five, he asks the morning star if she is alive. For she never leaves his mind (even if she recedes to the back, water over a shore, she simply comes right back when the moon reminds him she is somewhere, alive, her heart beating in time with the night's somber rhythm).

Weeks recede into months. An epidemic of typhus holds the barracks in a death grip. He wakes to glassy eyes that see nothing so often that he has become accustomed to the morbid greeting. It's almost as if the Reaper comes and offers his black toothy grin like a reminder of his own frail mortality (like the jack-o-lanterns he used to carve when he was small and he'd hang on the ends of his mother's apron as she emptied the pumpkin of its orange, stringy guts).

Another man will take his place and the cycle will repeat itself. Over and over. Again and again. Like a wheel that won't stop turning, not even for the sake of survival.

It is near dawn when he wakes with a terrible fever. Winter has receded now, his chilling fingers replaced with summer's heavy arms. His head swims, his stomach along with it, and he can barely move without upsetting this dangerous equilibrium. It is getting close to roll call, night pulling back its veil now, and he knows if he does not get up, they'll finally have a reason to kill him.

Slowly, he reaches for the buttress of his bunk. But it is too much movement for his damaged axis to handle. It tips. He spills over. The sound of retching fills the sleeping barrack.

He rouses the man in the square slab of wood next to him when his stomach twists and its scanty contents are emptied all over the floor. It does not miss his neighbor; he's covered in it, his moth-eaten blanket too. Instead of anger, Joseph is met with pity. The man helps him up at roll call, rallies his strength during the count, and helps him to the hospital before work. There is never a word between them, never an utterance of please or thank you or _you will be fine._Promises usually turn to lies around here. Wicked minds are changed too quickly or fate cannot hold on any longer, its strings frayed too much to go on.

Simple pity is all that the man gives to avoid making such holes in faith (or tempting the opposite result, perhaps). Joseph takes whatever he may find of humanity in this place of cold-faced demons and their withering prey.

Inside the hospital wing of the camp, another world thrives. It's a clean alternate reality. A haven sculpted of white and the occasional brushstroke of a human form (some are captured in the pastels of light and swift movements…others in the static realm of painted shadows). The only figment of the life he left behind, the one cruel piece of evidence that betrayed where he really is (a remote shard of heaven within the decayed flesh of hell), are the _muselmen_ shaped into the mold of their deathbeds. Most are too weak to make much noise, no groans or cries for help, simply cracked, dry lips that bleed their silent sorrows. He passes a few that he can sense are already dead, even with his head turning over and over like a carnival ride and his body riddled with fever. There is only so much that human hands can do to heal the wounds that inhuman cruelty has left in its wake.

He is helped into a bed. A new fear is born.

It is too mild here, the conditions too fine. Selection in the hospital is much more frequent than in the camp.

It is when he sees her, wallowing in sanitary darkness, and as she walks, she is a lantern that chases away the gloom.

* * *

She's the one that takes care of him. She will let no one else touch him.

Under her scrutiny, her gentle hands, he heals relatively quickly. The fever that made the summer feel cool and his forehead like glowing embers in a dying fire. It fades beneath her protective wing.

Sometimes, when he's not here, far off somewhere, wading through memories that help to soothe the ache of loneliness, she'll take his hand and try to smooth out the callus. Carry it into the arches of her own worked palms. She might think he doesn't notice. But he has gone so long without touch, without human console, that every last thread of his being thrums with the sensation. Even if he wanted to forget how nice it felt, to be proved human and alive by the gentle graze of her fingertips, he can't.

It is not typhus. If it were, he would probably have died. After three days lying in that bed, growing stronger with the rest, he can eat more than thinned out broth again and she begins slipping him two rations of bread and margarine. It is not safe, he knows, she knows, but they are both bound to share their secret between them. Like bread between strangers in a cattle car.

Another day passes. He can lift his head on his own. Another. He can get up on his own. Another and it is time for him to go. She comes to say goodbye, but their communication is shy, almost like the innocence that lay dying somewhere in the camps. Trampled on by big black boots. Shuffled through the dirt and scattered for the crows to eat. Sometimes, he thinks he sees it, the mangled body of his innocence. The remnants of his childhood. Dead. Gone. He knows he will never see it again.

A simple kiss on the hand is all he can afford, for his throat is dry and swollen and she doesn't seem to like talking. Words would break the fragility of the moment. They are too heavy for such a newborn hope. Her eyes are shining with it when he leaves. That she will see him again. That he will see her.

* * *

Their hope grows stronger. It begins to crawl. Crawl toward another danger that threatens to crush it before it even had a chance to blossom.

Transfer. The word is always so reluctant to linger on embittered tongues.

He never spoke much to them. He feared it would lead to their undoing in the end, when the _blockalteste_ learned of his affinity for them. They would die simply because he loved them. It was too transient here, any friendship, any camaraderie. He found it useless to dream of companionship. Solitude was painful enough. To lose more that he loved? He couldn't bear it. And he wouldn't either.

The women's barracks are far from here, from where he stands in their ranks of five before the empty slot of train tracks, waiting for the call of the locomotive on the horizon. It is not unusual to stand for hours on end, to sway within the tangled wisps of wind that pass them by, never looking back, never thinking to carry on its gentle wings their calls for mercy. For deliverance. He thinks of it. The wind. Perhaps pieces of their prayers lodged themselves in the currents and fell on deaf ears. Perhaps the outsiders knew of their secret anguish and did nothing. Perhaps the wind cared no more than they did. It had no heart, no soul, no cognizance. How could he expect the translucent-winged messenger to care for anything but its own endless journey?

Morning sinks into the pit of afternoon and it dulls the color of the sky above him. They are not allowed to sit. To move. They are barely permitted to breathe. But he cranes his neck and his eyes pierce the broken sky. Clouds patch up the torn pieces, trying to hide the wounds, but he knows better. He knows pain too well to let sympathy just drift by. He is not like the wind. He has a heart and soul that recognizes such aching oblivion.

Afternoon's golden light pours into the black ink urn of dusk and they are standing in the dark before long. Someone's legs buckle. The blockalteste seems to fly toward him, a dormant automaton programmed to hate and punish, and comes to life as he beats the man back up into upright submission. The poor creature struggles to hang on to the remaining vaults of his strength. They are crumbling, made of stone, and Joseph realizes his own strength is giving way to giving in. The fire still burns. He will make it.

At last, the whistle. The long, anguished scream of the engine as it nears. He stands straighter, straining his neck over the orderly ranks to see if he can find her. Brown hair that must feel like honey in his hands. He's imagined letting his hands glide through the soft waves, when the nights are endless and can spare no rest for him. He's imagined a lot of things about her. Like her name. Always her name. In his mind, her name is Delilah. Temptress. His doe-eyed downfall that walks through his mind so tirelessly, as if she will never cease walking again. It seems strange that so simple a creature, a woman, should conquer him so. But she is beauty, formless until given shape from the corpses of stillbirth stars. If only he could hold her, he could bear the traces of the angels that sift through the sieve of prisoners and guards and transfers. The dust of Heaven off its gold-wrought walks. It rests in her eyes.

There is no Delilah here. His focus slides back into self-preservation and he is packed away into the cattle car. There is hardly room to breathe, even amongst stacks of bones that seem to have no lungs for air, but he is near the barred window. The warm summer heat imparts its heady exhalations to him. He falls asleep against the door. Hungry. Always hungry (but it is more like starvation). There is no water or food here. Only two rations of bread that they have been given for the journey. He knows more will die and the thud, thud, thud will begin its morbid cadence again. Soon. In the days that will follow. If they are lucky, there will be no days. Only hours. But they are never lucky. Fortune has abandoned such luckless creatures for a more stable host to feed upon, to mislead into corruption, to give and gift and let thrive.

* * *

Three days. The thuds begin. He is roused from the void of sleep without dreams as the first resounds behind walls of flesh and bone. It seeps through the cracks. It finds him. Death steals among them and curls up in a corner, waiting to take away souls that have yet to come undone from their human fabrics. He waits. Silent and creeping upon them ever so slowly. Waits for time to do its work.

There is a little boy nearby. His eyes seem to dwarf his entire body. They are as clear as water trapped in cages of ice. He watches the ice-pools drift silently through the legs. Joseph breaks in half, kneeling beside the carcass that once held something like a mangled spirit not moments before. He reaches into the pocket. The bread lies untouched. He gives both of the stale crusts to the boy made of eyes. There is no water. He did what he could.

He searches the car for Delilah's face. Passes over cheekbones like mountains hidden by mortal flesh. Over eyes that stare perhaps into the folds of impending oblivion. Of encroaching death that lies still in his corner, collecting souls when they are loosened from their master's hold. He separates the masculine countenances from the feminine. But there are so few female that he gives up on searching for her after so long. He sleeps. Wakes at the sound of a thud, then pulls himself back into his body again, his mind too full to spare some room for more thought. He tries not to think.

By the end of the third day, there are too few left. The ones that have not made it through to the end, they are glanced over, and then shut away from the world with the shutting of the boxcar door. No one intends to bury them. They are faceless corpses in graves of straw.

Joseph, he wishes he could give their remains proper burial. But there is no time. He's shuffled into ranks of five. Standing. Thinking. Assignment. He follows his block to their barrack, an even smaller walled-in structure with no floor and smaller bunks. He slides into one and tries to sleep. But all he can think of is that little boy made of eyes and Delilah, mistress of the stars.

* * *

Their new _blockalteste_ is an SS officer.

He regards Joseph with hatred overflowing in his cold, empty eyes. It is the only feeling the Nazis know how to feel, that they recognize. All traces of former humanity have been cast out. All that remains is the hate.

"Look at me."

He obeys. He knows better than to be disobedient with the SS.

He decides, as he looks Joseph over, that the Jew stands too straight, too tall. He looks too strong. Not broken enough, he thinks. He must be broken. There is a wild spirit in this Jew that needs to be tamed before it grows a new coat of rebellion. He is assigned to work in the crematorium. Where bodies are reduced to ashes. Bodies that once held smiles and laughter and memories of family that have long since died. Who will remember the dead when the living themselves have gone to join them in eternity? He doesn't know. He's asked himself such questions before. But they have led to no answers.

The cold eyes narrow. The ice cracks and is crushed as it folds over on itself. They are too shallow to hold anything but the black pollution of hate. "Pig, you dare fight for your life?"

He does not answer. Not unless told to answer. Then he will reply, but only then.

"You will be broken," promises the _blockalteste_. His rifle almost seems alive, another appendage that has been removed from the body and carried separately. It thrums like a live wire. Ready. Waiting._Hungry._"_Schwein._You are nothing. You think you are worthy of having a soul, but you are wrong. Wait and see, filth. There will be no fighting spirit in you left when I am through with you. When you have worked the ovens and watch your fellow rats _burn_."

A flare rises up in him. Strength derived from his morning star. A withered hand is upon his shoulder as he starts forward with murderous intentions, to drive the Nazi skull into the earth and let it yield beneath the soles of his feet. Let it slowly collide with hell. Destiny drives it there. He wants to force the hand of fate. Make it faster. Manacle this demon to its fiery chains.

But the hand, it stays him. Too late. The _blockalteste_is a mound of senses and its ears prick as he perceives the sound of insolence. The resonation of defiance. This will not do. The ice-eyed demon turns on his heel and in one swift motion the butt of the live wire rifle crashes into the slanting arc of Joseph's long, graceful jaw. It is not the first time he has been beaten with a gun. It will not be the last.

"Stand."

Another blow to his fallen spine. He winces. No pain. No.

"I said _stand!_"

Another blow. And another. And another.

"Stand you useless trash! You good for nothing pile of refuse!" The rifle pounded into his bones that felt as fragile as glass. "_I said_ _stand!"_

Through the relentless beatings, he manages to somehow rise on buckling knees, with bruised and tattered shoulders.

His smile is not like a smile at all. It is a mirthless gesture. A swallowing of light, of gentleness, and sends forth hot-breathed cruelty. "Perhaps you will think twice before thinking at all..."

His last blow is the most painful of all. A crack against the temple. His strength fails him. He is lying on the ground, pining for death for the first time in months, and there is no will to get up again. Perhaps he will die here. His last defiance would have been for nothing.

Palms that have cooled their youthful wrath with age swathe his bloodstained face. He pants and tries to open eyes that are beginning to swell. At last, they free themselves, peeled back to reveal the image of an old man that is trying to dab away some of the blood.

His efforts are in vain. The blockalteste demon refuses to let such acts of kindness flourish under his reign of violence. The gun is a live wire again. It beats its shape into the back of the old man's skull. He laughs, the sound not of earth. "You rats are so eager to help one another!"

The voice, it is unrelenting. Pig. Rat. Dog. Dirt. Filth. They are no longer human. Only animals. Inanimate creatures of the earth that have no meaning, no significance, no entitlement to breath and food and love. Two men lay huddled together, curling in on themselves like moths caught in flame, and they try. Try to hang on. It is easier for Joseph than for the old man.

He looks up and finds himself staring into a face that holds two icy pits of gray-tinged blue. They are full. Full of innocence that will not let go. The little boy from the train…he scuttles after the ranks of_Kommandos_ that march onward with their _Kapos_, not looking back, no _never_. The little _pipel_ who follows his gentle-minded _Kapo_ wherever he goes. Up and down and everywhere he goes.

* * *

He never speaks. Only when ordered to. Only when it is required of him.

The old man with healing hands that have been shattered with time. The little _pipel_ whose eyes stain his very soul with thoughts of blue. The woman who never leaves his mind, always wandering, leaving stardust and beauty in her wake. His head is full of these people. They have impressed him somehow, and yet they have no names. Simply shapes that amble through the corridors of hell, too much like angels to belong here.

He has not seen her since the fever (he hopes it is work that keeps her gone from him, but death is too frequent a visitor for him to rely on too much hope). The old man has begun to bunk next to him, the little boy as well. Only the old man seems to have the will, the strength, to speak softly against the frailty of their budding camaraderie. They are well chosen words. Words that will impact lives torn asunder. That will leave a mark, a thought, an echo in time.

The _pipel_ brings him extra bread and he, in turn, shares his blanket with the wide-eyed boy. The warmth is comforting. As is the presence of skin, breathing skin. Joseph finds himself sleeping easier. He still wakes before dawn, careful not to wake the dreams of innocence, to greet the morning star and take from her his daily bread (he must not let the flame go out).

Work is not the same. In essence, it bears the same physical brunt, takes away from him the energy he wishes he could save and store for later, but the effects are more severe upon his heart. Every morning, he waits for the furnace to heat. The fires within the ovens to be set. Then the bodies. They come in by the dozens. By the hundreds. He must burn them all. Men and women and children. Even infants, who are no longer restless with curiosity, must be fed to the hungry coals. He cannot bear to watch them go in and catch flame.

And sometimes. Sometimes they are alive when they go in. He has to hear them scream, listen to them cry to God, to heaven, to anyone to save them. It is too late by the time the guards leave for him to extract them from their fiery grave. They are black. They are ashes. They are gone. No more screams or pleas or simmers of death. Only the simmering of their being consumed. He breaks. Cracks. Fissures of his restraint grow wider. He can't take much more of this. He can't eat for the smell of burning flesh has sunk into his clothes, his throat, his nose. He can't sleep because all he dreams of is flames. Of bodies that wake in fire. That scream and cry and beg for one last chance. _I can work. I promise. Please, let me live. One more day. Please._

One day, when a young child is thrown, alive, into the scorching oven, he falls to his knees and cries. His sobs could be heard throughout the crematorium. It summons his inner demon, embodied, encased in mortal crust. The black leer finds him. Finally a _muselman_. Finally the walking dead.

"Have you had enough then?" The black boots in his face seem to ask. How can he answer? Does his voice still live or has it died with the child in the fire?

The boot strikes him. His lips cracks and bleeds, drops of scarlet staining the floor of ash.

"Filth, you will _answer_me. Have you had enough?"

Joseph looks up. Up into the demon's leer. He sees flashes of devil's red in the roots of those cruel grinning teeth. He set his jaw against the trembling stabs of rage which plunge into his tapering resolve, making the hardened surface rupture and crack. To kill this man. To tear him down, layer by shallow layer of cruelty, in such fits of temper that he will cease to impose death and torment any longer. It will be his redemption, the execution of the black coat demon. Joseph will rise from the ashes of the fallen tyrant like a saint. Patron of the anguished masses.

But all he has is quiet defiance. Slow-burning hatred that smolders deep within him. "_Enough_."

He is transferred into a different _Kommando_not the next day or the day after. He must suffer a few more fiery deaths before he is finally relieved. Suffer their last screams as the black demons look on, amused, untouched by pity, by his sorrow. Suffer the breaking point of his own heart...after this, after this moment, there is no repairing it. It is broken for eternity and he will bear the missing pieces until the end of the world.

For long weeks, he was Charon.

Ferryman of the dead.

But he received no payment for watching them wilt and wither and burn.

* * *

It is when he sees her. The ovens of hell exchanged for an angel in the factories.

He works the ammunitions factory. Assembling bullets for all types of rifles that may be used for his own execution someday. Ironic, building the reason of one's death. Being ultimately responsible for the cessation of living. He bites on the quirk of fate, feels it squirm beneath his teeth, and the bitterness of the taste fills his mouth.

They lock eyes. Exchange small glances. She looks around, her dark hair swishing over angles of bones in her neck (it is still so short, growing, but slowly), and finds no prying scrutiny. Her hand reaches into the pocket of her prison uniform and it takes out a piece of bread. It is her customary greeting. A look and bread. He wishes to ask her name, but she has become, and will always be, Delilah in his eyes. He has become a stargazer. Watching the movements of the imps of heaven as they sparkle and unravel and dance. Their beauty seems unfit for such backgrounds of night's impenetrable darkness.

Every morning, afternoon, the moments before the bell for the end of work is called, he commits to memory new features of her face. A freckle. A color. A habit. All of them construct her final figure in his mind until she is no longer a star-sprinkling ghost, but a flesh and blood being. In his dreams, her freckles are stardust that have been brushed over her olive cheeks. He dreams now. Of his friends that he never knew he's made until he's fallen asleep. The boy laughs and new teeth are beginning to grow in the place of empty slots of gums. The old man tells stories, such stories that make his heart warm. Everything is different there, in his reverie, in his illusions of the night. Perhaps he will ask the sun to make him dream more often.

Everything in his world has turned to sky. Heavenly impersonations of the world's celestial crown. Delilah of the stars. David of the laughing sun. And Methuselah of the wizened moon (sometimes, when the moniker for his old companion crosses his mind, he laughs).

By day, Delilah works at his side, her child's hands busy with building bullets. By night, he sleeps beside David with Selah's soft snores preying upon his drowsy ears.

They fill him with hope. There's more to live for now than the fire. Than rising with the morning star.

But it can only last for so long.

* * *

David is the first.

A new _Kapo_has been assigned to the wide-eyed boy's _Kommando._Unlike the mild-mannered giant that first directed them, this man is his opposite in every way. Where he was gentle, this man is harsh. Where he was kind, this man is cruel. Where he was tall and warm as a mother's heart, this man is short and cold as the mistress of ice herself.

It is a warm day that he must witness the boy's death. It is not in fire or in ice that he is taken from Joe, but in bruises. In blood. Drowning in it. The boy has done nothing wrong, simply tugged upon the man's sleeve to impose an inquiry upon the black-coated monster, and the _Kapo_swivels on his axis like a world gone mad. He strikes the boy in the cheek. He goes down, ground into the sand by a bit black boot.

He knows what will happen next. He tries to race forward, to save David from fate's encroaching hands at the price of a beating from the malicious _Kapo_, but Selah detains him.

The boot stamps down upon the fragile head. It breaks as if only the shell of an egg. Shatters.

Blood runs in little rivers through the dirt for a long time. Until the rivers run dry.

The _Kapo_and his fearful _Kommando_are long gone, marching in the distance, but Joe still remains. Rooted to his spot until his _blockalteste_calls for ranks of five. Selah pulls him into some semblance of order. But Joe is far away. He is beaten for it, for his distance, but he never feels the pain.

The body is still there when he returns from work that evening. It's still drawing flies.

* * *

Weeks pass.

His old companion is getting no younger, there is no mistaking that. It's a fact of life that must be heeded, but not dwelled upon, as all are a victim of mortality.

Only age seems to follow him more closely now. His eyes grow blank. Heavy with the obscurity that trails behind him like smoke. Chimney smoke. It makes Joe crumble inside, somewhere he can't find, and the splinters are washed away with the tide of blood in his veins. They catch on his insides. It hurts, but he couldn't speak of his own death to the old man. The act of wasting away was an involuntary one. Perhaps he never knew it.

Joe attempts to keep his friend alive in any way he can. Could he bear to lose another? No. Watching the little _pipel_ be crushed beneath that big black boot was enough for him to keep his remaining two as close to him as he could. It reminded him of how fragile they were in this place. How close their souls were to the otherworldly predator. Rations were cut in half. Less black coffee and only half a piece of bread at meal times. Joe gave his half to Selah. But mostly he wouldn't take it.

Still, the old man wastes away. His black skin looks pale somehow, as if so finely coated in snow. He stares off into nothingness. Searching for a door into heaven.

He finds it one night while Joe sleeps. In his dream, where David still laughs amongst the sun and the sky, he thought he heard the old man's voice in his ear, bidding him farewell and goodbye, but it is only a remote whisper. A far off threat.

When he wakes from a hand on his shoulder, shaking him, he thinks it is his friend rousing him for roll call. But when he opens his eyes, he is greeted by the same morbid face of smiling death; the old man is already cold. He grows stiff. The Reaper possesses the body, tearing out the soul from its bed, and as Joe blinks, the black smile is gone.

And so is the old man. Taking another piece of Joe's heart with him.

Only Delilah remains.

Her hands are as quick as ever in assembling the bullets. Perhaps even quicker than his own. It soothes him somehow. Keeps him safe from despair. Already two of his friends have gone from him, before he could even bid them goodbye. Deep inside of him, where animal instincts crawled on their bellies, waiting for an opportunity to find a passageway into his mind, he begins to wonder. Wonder if he should remain aloof. Stay away. Already the ties to human contact have softened his resolve. His will to live. If he wants to survive, he must cut all ties with the girl, those instincts whisper to him, they tell him lies.

He does want to live. But he resists their callous advice. And he lives anyway.

Already he has been transferred to many camps. Three, if he counts, and they all fit on one hand, but it feels like more when he draws back onto sore recollection. One more, he hopes. One more before the end of the war. Talk of the Red Army circulates through the camp as if through a body of growing hope. The same sort of optimism that kept Joe's vigor alive (spawned by Delilah's survival…it would die with her).

He dares to store faith in such rumors, but it is a quaint offering of trust. The transfer is coming. He can't be sure.

The day that the train arrives to take them, he leaves his hopes for the end on the platform of the station, and follows his one last hope in human form into the train. The faith in German surrender is trampled upon by thousands of shoes. Big black boots weighed down by heavy winter clothes and ones with gaps in their soles.

It is mere hours, the journey. This time there is no listening for thuds, for the cadence, for death stealing into a shadowed corner. Delilah sits at Joe's side. She is silent. He has never heard her voice and for once he wishes he has. For there is no knowing when she, too, will be taken from him. Who then would he have in the world? His family is dead. His friends are all dead, from his previous life and the half-life he suffers now. She is the only living relic to his ability to love. The anger that once defined him has been drained of all power to conceive hatred for his oppressors. All he is…is a shell.

It is dark in the corner where they are huddled together. She begins to shiver as the cold settles in for the passage through the winter-conquered countryside. There are no icicles, but the frozen wind comes in to visit, unaware of his effect on his human companions. He tucks her away from the cold world, into his emaciated side, and she looks up at him. Her eyes are warm and the familiar feeling of falling fills his stomach with butterflies. She warms him with only a look and a smile. That locking of eyes that occurs so often between them. He has counted the time they have known one another in his head as her tiny frame nestles into his.

He measures time into measurements that humans can understand. The days, the weeks, the months. They all convert into a year. Strange how light it feels in his hands as he weighs it, the length of their acquaintance. How they have never uttered a word in each other's presence and yet have come to rely on one another.

He fears she will die as her light trembles only seem to escalate into full-bodied shivers that shake him too. There must be a blanket nearby. He motions for her to stay with his hands and moves, slowly, through the unstable boxcar. A few frightened looks and whispers of doubt are all he receives for his efforts. No blankets. Nothing. There are no dead to steal from either. Everyone is alive, if not only half so. He moves back to his place and this lulls the other passengers out of the danger of panic once more. He settles in beside her and opens his shirt, drawing her into his pure heat that radiates off his skin. After a few minutes, her frightful shaking recedes, and he rests his cheek in her hair (he notices, for the first time, that it has grown only three inches since the year he met her). It is dark brown like he always dreamed.

There is no transition for him, from the waking world into the realm of sleep. He simply hovers over the deeper waters, where reveries lie, where true rest waits to be soaked into weary bones. To revive them from the doldrums of their deepest aches. It feels like waiting without thinking. Without perceiving. Time passes him by quickly in this strange world between worlds.

The door to the boxcar slides open. A new hell awaits them. Delilah unfurls from his warmth and he does not bother to button up his shirt. They are herded outside, back into the frozen air, and their breath mingles as it rises up into a black chocolate sky. He blinks up as he is pushed forward by the swell of the crowd and watches the stars blink back. As if to say hello.

An unearthly smell hits them as their noses acclimate to the cold. Like death. Death caught fire. Someone points to a billow of black smoke that rises in the air, somehow stark against an equally black sky. Everyone turns to fear in their ignorance. What will they do with them? What is going on? What is that unholy stench?

Most know the answer. Joseph is among them. It is the smell of burning flesh. They are burying their dead the only way they know how. With fire. Because all the Nazis know is how to kill, how to inflict the worst of tortures, how to eliminate all traces of their sadistic acts of murder. A bit of the old flare of anger rises up in him and he bites his lip so hard (it bleeds) to restrain it. Where had that come from? He thought he had lost such fury long ago to the _Kapo_that had made him work the crematorium.

Delilah reaches for his hand. She is afraid too. He holds it as long as he can, as long as it is possible for him to keep her near to him, but as they are filed inside the camp (a gold eagle sits perched upon the main gate, roosting over a red Nazi flag), they come to a fork in the road. A high-ranking officer stands before them. They are broken apart, a club smashing Joe's hand (it sears with pain, but at the moment it is ignored). In a split second, a fracture of time, the officer points once to the left and once to the right. Joseph is pushed violently into the procession that leads to the right while Delilah, panic-stricken, goes to the left.

He tries to break free from his binds. The unseen chains that separate them.

The last time he sees her alive, before she disappears from his view, he sees her washed in fear.

He never sees her again. And all he can think about, as life goes on, is that he never heard her speak. Not once. He doesn't know her name, the sound of her voice, the sound of his name quietly dancing on her lips and her tongue.

None of them. He knew none of them.

And yet he loved them so dearly.

* * *

It is near the end of winter that he is transferred to Kraufering.

Life before then was as if phasing through a trance. He does not remember anything. Not the work, not the bitter black coffee that kept him warm through the dead of winter, not the _Kapos_or the_blockalteste._Nothing. Only the look in Delilah's eyes as she is ushered to her death (later he learns of the crematorium…that those sorted to the left went straight for the gas chambers and then for the ovens).

And the smell of burning flesh.

Kraufering is no different from the other circles of hell. Death occurrs all around him. In the form of beatings. Of typhus. Starvation. It is not picky. The Reaper takes whoever he wishes to take and no one questions him. Not even Joseph.

He returns to the anger. It is all he could feel after losing everything. It is the same rage he experienced following the death of his father, his last surviving family, and it had never wholly quelled until his work in the crematorium. Here, he exists much the same as he had at Dachau. Transient. Bodiless. As if he is a soul that has somehow been separated from its physical being. He searches for the corpse. His familiar face lying in ruins somewhere on the banks of the dead. He has to be somewhere. He wouldn't be here, seething quietly behind his chewed lips, his fire-stricken eyes, if his carcass isn't lying in wait for him behind these walls of barbed wire.

March gives way to April. The night before the camp is evacuated, Joseph crawls into his hut that is built for only four people, but holds eight (some are lying on the floor, some are dead). Something in him tells him to simply give in. To stop fighting. The fire was snuffed out. There is nothing left to fight for. Please...surrender your arms. Let yourself die in peace while there is still enough for me to salvage.

_By dawn, you will be saved. I promise._

The next morning, he doesn't move for the evacuation. The oath that the voice swore, he heeds it. He keeps it because it is all he has. He remains in his bunk, knowing well enough that he will die. Just like the child in the oven, the one that beseeched him with tearful eyes to save her from her death by fire. She had been a beautiful little porcelain doll. She had fallen to pieces and then melted away in the blaze. And then there remained nothing of the china blue eyes that had screamed for him to save her.

He closes his eyes. He can still feel the echoes of her weeping, her pleas, in the concaves of his broken heart. He couldn't have saved her. Just like he can't save himself.

Two days later, on April 27, 1945, a very strange set of visitors came knocking at their door. Death steals away into a corner, made skittish by the unknown faces that stand staring through the barbed wire fence.

The day of liberation has come.

And Joseph is dying.

* * *

When he wakes, his first though it that he is dead already. It seems like heaven. There is no smell of rotting earth or defecation. There is no bunk carved out of dirt. The roof is made of wood and there are windows through which unfiltered light creeps and dances upon the white sheets of the bed, the _real bed,_that waits for use beside him. He sits up, still weak, and finds himself in a bed as well. With white sheets and a warm blanket. He must be dreaming. This must all be the very cruelly authentic mirage of a feverish mind. When he closes his eyes, blinks and returns to his body, he will wake to the mud-caked ceiling. Everything will be normal again. Close to the end, to heaven, but still normal to him. He has grown used to pacing outside of the pearl gates. They wait for him. Long to take him in. It is only a matter of time before they may have him.

Looking behind him, as he blinks (just like the more rational part of his brain tells him to do), there is a goose-feather pillow. The indentation of his head is beginning to re-inflate as the pressure fades away.

The room is warm. Everything, his own blood and skin, is warm.

A hand as gentle as a summer rain, and just as soothing, gently pours down upon his withered form. The fingers, up to their wrists and the hems of the sleeves, are bloodstained, but nonetheless beautiful, like pale marble carved into the shape of a working man's hands. Joseph looks up at the face to which the hands belong. Another angel. This time it was a man.

Yes. Yes, this must be heaven. He is dead after all.

Sunlight reflects off blue-black hair as if upon a lake blanketed by nightfall. Reflections of moonlight are wound into the dark strands. Eyes as soft and dark as the depths of the sea gaze upon him, tell him gently, without words, that he will be all right. That he would live. No more dealing with death. Do not be afraid. Here, you will find no more odds that feel too impossible for hope to bear. This is paradise, after all. And it is eternal. There is no end to happiness. To contentment.

"You take it easy there," croons the man in a strange accent, one that Joseph has never heard before. Not in all his life (and it felt so long, his life, as if age had found him somehow in the darkness of the camps).

The man is dressed in a freshly pressed khaki uniform. A red cross band, the reassuring symbol sheathed in white cloth, is wrapped around his arm. "It's all right. No more worryin' for you. You're gonna be all right. Just…stay in bed. No wanderin', all right? It's okay. You're safe now, you hear? You're safe."

He has never heard words more lovely. He lies back down after the medic leaves and tapers off into a dream.

His three friends, lost to the camps, are there. They smile, pat his back, and congratulate him on never giving up hope. He hasn't the heart to tell him that he had…that after they were gone, he was too.

Delilah spares him a kiss. In his dream, her lips are soft and warm.

* * *

In the afternoon, two more men came to his bedside. They knew he spoke English and they wanted to take advantage of his ability; they asked his name. He told them it was Joseph (the first time he'd spoken in a year).

The two men, officers of high rank he could tell, tell him that none of them knew German. Only one and it is no perfect knowledge that this particular man has of the language. The intricacies, the colloquialisms, he cannot grasp. He couldn't understand some of what the other prisoners were trying to describe. All they knew is that Kraufering is a camp. Prisoners are kept in terrible conditions, most condemned to death by starvation or typhus fever.

The red-headed man looked at him, all severity. "What sort of prisoners were kept there, Joseph?"

A darkness settles in Joe's eyes. But it is overwhelmed by a perfect sadness.

One simple word. The man with dark hair and five o'clock shadow stares at him in disbelief as it is uttered. As if the underlying current of rage that soaks the Jew's voice to its beaten core couldn't prove his answer. Not more than gentle honesty could.

There is no room for gentleness in Joseph anymore.

Just the hatred that the Nazis taught him to nurture. To let consume him. He has learned their lesson well.

"_We are_ _Jews_."

* * *

_This story is **all **fiction. It is based on true events, but did not take place in any time in history._


End file.
